Ecumenical discussion founded upon historic Christian orthodoxy

More Thoughts on a Protestant Bible

In light of Fr. Wells’ comments on my previous post, I feel a few qualifications and additional comments are in order:

1. I think we all need to keep in mind that dreams have more than one purpose. A dream is not made invalid by its lack of correspondence to reality or potential reality. Through the expression of dreams, we articulate our dissatisfaction with the status quo, and give voice to our longings for a better world. Sometimes those expressions inspire others, or serve to wake people up from their acceptance of the present order. The usefulness of a dream cannot be measured by the likelihood of its realization in this world. God often called his prophets in the OT to preach to the people with the full knowledge that their voice would be ignored.

That is what I did in my post on the need for a Protestant Bible. I was expressing a desire for things to be different, and charting out the way I wished things would progress. Do I expect the Christian world to now take notice and begin to implement my ideas? Obviously not.

2. Now is it true that the discussion of textual criticism is a big tadoo over nothing? Here I need to make some important points, which I have already alluded to, but probably with a lack of clarity:

a) I am not actually talking here about the way text-criticism as a scientific discipline in the academy ought to be done (though I think the thoroughgoing eclectic method has the least problems). I am talking here about how Bible translation ought to be done, and how in my view the Church has wrongly adopted a “received text” from the realm of academic inquiry rather than from the judicious practices of the ancient Christian Church at least from the fourth century onwards (precisely the period when the boundaries of the NT canon became more or less settled under Constantine).

The reason modern Bible translation should be based on the Byzantine Text is manifestly NOT (in my view of things) because it is the earliest, purest form of the text, which enables us to more or less reduplicate the inspired autographs (here I differ from Burgon, Hills and modern Majority Text advocates). It is only by expressing a bias in favor of the judgments of the post-fourth century Church that such a conclusion can be reached with any degree of confidence. While on the whole I am happy to presume in favor of the Church’s judgment, they did not have access to any infallible process at that time that would make it possible to recover the text of the autographs after three centuries of textual diversity. The fact is that we know very little about the state of the NT text throughout the entirety of the Roman empire prior to the fourth century. There is little data from some of the most important geographical regions (like Southern Italy, Greece, Turkey and Syria).

So where does that leave us? The exact state of the autographs is simply beyond our recovery, as the practitioners of text criticism will admit in their more sober moments. They are not even trying to recover the exact words of the prophets and apostles of the first-century Church, but only the closest approximation to those words that is now possible. There is virtual certainty regarding 90% of the NT text, but it seems to me that full access to the remaining 10% will elude us until we see “face to face” on the other side.

b) So what should we do? In my view the diversity of the text from the second century onwards (it is widely accepted that most of the variants originated prior to 200 A.D.) gives us a window into the way the NT text was appropriated in the early Church. The textual variants are windows into Church history, and useful to that extent. Some of the variants were beneficial for Church use and interpretation, and others proved not to be. From the fourth century onwards, those variants which the scribes had to deal with were sifted through and those that were deemed most useful for the copying and preservation of the scriptures for Church use were retained. That canonical version of the NT text (corresponding to the MT of the Old Testament) is what we now have in the Byzantine Text, and it is that form of the text (subject to correction on a case by case basis by judicious scholars laboring for the Church) which commends itself for Church use and Bible translation.

So this is not all a bunch of fuss over nothing, unless one thinks the scribal practices of the Church from the fourth century onwards are irrelevant for us today. And that is not a very catholic way of approaching the matter.

3. As for the problem of bishops who cannot read Greek, such was certainly not the case historically in the Anglican Church, and I hope that the course of the future will conform to the trends of the past. In any case, the point here is not the competence of the bishops, but the spiritual service of the scholars engaged in the task, who recognize that they are accountable to the duly recognized pastors of the Church under Jesus Christ for the quality of their labors, not to the approval of the academy.

4. Let me again emphasize that nothing of what I say here should be taken as a swipe at academia and its labors. There are scholars who labor diligently in the study of biblical manuscripts, the use of the NT in the Fathers, and the ancient versions of the scriptures. We (as a modern society) need scholars in the academy to collate manuscripts, examine scribal tendencies, and produce critical apparatuses for the NT. But of course, the goal of such projects is to advance modern knowledge in a scientific sense, not to serve as an agent of the Christian faith. I guess I am just too much of a churchman to believe that we have to wait on the results of such research projects to have confident access to a form of the New Testament that can be translated for the use of the Church.

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6 Responses

Hill was not a majority text scholar technically. He seemed to believe in the providential assembling of the TR which made it unassailable and the text by which other manuscripts were to be evaluated which I doubt anyone else outside the “King James Only” camp believes. I believe he would significantly differ from Burgon on this point however the two names have been lumped together.

After rereading Burgon (scanning) I am not sure a majority of texts would always necessarily rule the day with him though, in general, he would go against the modern Textual Critical canons which seem to want to choose the most obscure reading as the most likely to be original.

That’s why the TNIV renders Mark 1:41 “Jesus was indignant” instead of the traditional “filled with compassion”. That canon holds except in cases like 1 Cor 13 where something obscure like “give my body to be burned” is too obscure and they default back to something more “reasonable”. Therefore 1 Cor 13:3 TNIV reads “[If I] give over my body [to hardship] that I may boast…”. (If you understand the logic of that illogic, congratulations, you may be a budding textual critic!)

I think Burgon is worth rereading… if I can find the time especially if in God’s providence such a project like this might come about. Hmmm. Producing a Contemporary Burgon theory Byzantine NT might be a great PhD project. (Under the guidance of a Bishop of course!)

1. Yes, Hills is more thoroughgoing in his application of the principle of providence on through to the Reformation. He distances himself from Burgon a bit in The King James Version Defended, pp. 192-193.

2. No need to create a modern critical edition of the Byzantine Text. Maurice Robinson, The New Testament in the Original Greek (Chilton, 2005) is a great source.

Paul, thanks for your thoughtful reply. Let me see if I understand you. You feel that there are too many translations but this problem could be cured by yet another one, right?

And with a “catholic” perspective, why are you concerned for a Protestant Bible? The one translation which seems most successful ecumenically is the RSV. It was hated by fundamentalist Protestants in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but is quite popular with conservative leaning FC’s nowadays. The Ignatius Bible (an edition of the RSV) is a fine product, and I would nominate it for the worthy purpose you have set before us.

And I will stand by my assertion that textual criticism is much ado about very little. My reading on the topic has told me that 85% of the NT verbiage has unanimous support, but I like your figure of 90% even better. The remaining 15% or 10% is mostly without doctrinal significance, and not a single doctrine of the Christian faith can be settled by a variant reading.

The only two places in the NT where textual studies hold any interest for me are (1) the conclusion of Mark and (2) the “Pericope de Adultera” in John 8. The RC’s have resolved that nicely by declaring them canonical in their own right, which removes the problem to another playing field altogether. RC Biblical scholars, as far as I know, are quite respectiful of the critical text and not hung up on rehabilitating Burgon.

I guess it’s pretty clear that you have a different point of view here. I think my comments regarding the chaos of the contemporary Bible market are pretty clear, and I’m not sure your way of characterizing my proposal does it justice. But we can agree to disagree. Thanks for your thoughts.

One of the best essays I can recommend is the one which appears in the back of The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform (Chilton, 2005), by Robinson and Piermont. This is a version of a paper by Maurice Robinson which originally appeared in the online journal TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 6 (2001), which can be accessed online. I honestly believe that there would be far fewer dogmatic advocates of reasoned eclecticism coming out of our seminaries if more people were to be exposed to Robinson’s work.

I should make it clear however that whereas Robinson believes the wording of the autographs can be recovered entirely from the surviving Byzantine Textform Greek manuscripts, I am not making such a claim. I see the Byzantine Text as the ecclesiastical/canonical/edited form of the text, which best preserves the message conveyed by the autographs in the judgment of the Church, even if not always the exact wording. I also am not opposed to the possibility that some better readings may have been lost within the dominant text, and can now be recovered on a case by case basis from the older manuscripts.

When it comes to textual criticism as a scientific discipline (which is not my area, so my opinions are only suggestive), leaving theological and ecclesiastical concerns aside, I believe that the thoroughgoing eclectic method has the fewest problems, because the Byzantine Text hypothesis must postulate the existence of a text-type in the first three centuries for which there is no hard evidence (though Robinson shows a good circumstantial case can be made). So my view is that all reasonable variant readings should be presumed to be of equal antiquity, and judgments about the merits of variants should be made on internal considerations. But again, this is an entirely different matter from making choices about the form of the text which should be used as the basis for modern Bible translation, as I have argued above.